Dear Kari-Hans,
Some other thoughts.
Identifying the difference between engineers and designers is not so simple. There is (and has been for the last thirty years at least) a strong debate in the professional engineering community about the difference between engineers and engineering designers. This is mainly found in the literature about engineering education and professional certification. The essence of the debate is that currently, engineering education has a strong bias towards developing skills in mathematical modelling rather than designing. In most tertiary engineering degrees, the engineering design component is only around 10% of the course. In the UK and Australia there are also many issues of status and historical precedent. For example, until recently, most engineering designers (unlike professional engineers) came up through the vocational training routes, and had trade certificates and diplomas from FE and TAFE rather than engineering degrees. In practical terms (in theory!), the main difference between an engineers and an engineering designer is the engineer is good at making mathematical models (often from scratch), and the engineering designer uses the data from mathematical models in their designing rather than developing the models. The ability to make the mathematical models is regarded as a higher status activity by the profession. (In reality, the most common activity of engineers is writing reports and memos but that's another story).
From my experience, THE big dividing differnce between engineers and other product designers is the use of maths. The use of mathematics in designing is a very powerful tool for three reasons: a massive amount of human knowledge is encoded in compact mathematical models/equations etc; the mathematical manipulation of models of designs offers immense predictive power; the use of mathematical models and suitable optimisation techniques provides a very powerful and economic method for sifting through very large numbers of potential solution possibilities for best solutions. Engineerining designers and engineers specialise in the use of these design tools.
The combination of the above two means many engineers become a little blinkered to possibilities of designing and design issues that cannot easily be converted into mathematical representations. On the other hand, designers who don't have a deep competency in mathematical modelling seem unaware of the massive advantages it offers in identifying better solutions.
All the best,
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Love Design & Research
PO Box 226
Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel/Fax +61 (0)8 9305 7629
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